My daughter is nearly 9 months old. We've been ECing since she was a couple of weeks old. Good thing, too, because she often got upset right before she peed, and I would have never known why she was crying (since she was dry) if I didn't know she was aware BEFORE she peed.

At 2-3 months, she was doing awesome! She would give a little "aaak" when she needed to pee, and would get really smily, silly, and talkative when she needed to have a bowel movement. She slept 8-10 hours straight at night, and would wake up dry, which would be followed (many days) by another 8-10 hours of dry naps and good communication on both of our parts. So, she was going 16-18 hours straight on some days without a single miss. I thought, "Yeah, I can do this! No problem!"...

... Well, needless to say, at three months things started going downhill. Things have gone up and down ever since. We are currently at a particularly low point. We cloth diaper during the day, and do a disposable at night because she no longer sleeps as well, nor does she wake up from night or naps dry (at least not by the time she cries out). We are currently going through about 10-15 diapers a day. She no longer will go while being held over the sink (she arches her back and starts to cry), which is fine with me because she will go while sitting on her baby Bjorn. But she no longer signals in a way that I can understand, and seems to go again in her diaper/training pants very soon after pottying.

We are the only ones I know doing this. I'm thankful my husband has been on board since the beginning, but otherwise, I feel like I have no support. I'm at a loss. I just found out I'm pregnant again, and I feel a bit overwhelmed. I told my husband that all of our work looks like it's been pointless. He told me he was pleased with what I've accomplished (I'm a SAHM, so I do most of the pottying), that he expects she'll get back in the groove soon, and he wants to do the same with our next little one. As frustrated as I can get, I don't see any alternative to EC now; it's my new standard of normal. I guess I'd just like some advice or encouragement.

We are right with you! Great communication early on. Now the only catches we get are dies to timing or based on instinct. No potty communications from our 10month old.

I am not stressing since the whole pint of EC for us is being responsive to our little one's needs. Right now he is focusing on moving and talking. Not so interested in communicating his elimination needs.

My advice is simply to relax and cut all of you some slack =) Like the PP said, at this stage, babes are focusing on moving and talking and pottying is WAY down on their priority list. It's the most frustrating stage but the idea is to help them stay clean & dry while they go through those stages so just focus on that. Limit nakey-bum time to when you're both rested and paying attention and make sure you have enough diapers or training pants that you aren't worrying about laundry. Oh, and with my oldest we used disposables almost exclusively for at least the first 6 mo and then always when away from home until he was nearly a graduate. We lived in an apartment and it was too stressful to worry about laundry.

If she's crawling, start leaving clean potties where she can access them and try to find a few clear times a day when you can potty her easily (after naps was always a good one for us). And keep talking to her about it - "oh, your pants are wet, let's change those. Next time you have to pee, tell me and we can put the pee into the potty so your pants stay dry" or something like that.

Like you said, it's simply a way of life for you now and you couldn't go back, but it's still not natural in our culture so there's a big learning curve, especially with the first baby. When I read back at my postings from that time, it's the same that nearly everyone goes through, but it really was a blip in the scheme of things, a rocky year of pottying that's been followed by over a dozen years of a kid who doesn't even really understand what potty training is (he thought it was an insult in kindergarten when he was asked if he'd been potty training, since his baby brother already used the potty ;-) )

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I don't know if I'd say we've "given up", but we've seriously stepped back from it. He doesn't like being on the potty at all right now, so I'll periodically try (he went on the potty after anap the other day!), but only when we all seem calm enough to handle it so we're pretty much full-time diapers. It's a little disheartening. I don't know if we'll ever get back to EC or if he's not going to be ready until he's fully ready for "proper" potty training.

In the past two weeks he's cut 3 teeth, one a molar, and learned to walk without support- so, yeah, there's some major changes going on that are definitely taking precedence over the potty. I am hoping that after his second molar cuts, everything will chill out and he'll be ready to give EC another go. He was doing REALLY well before dropping it.

Disposables at night because he leaks like crazy when asleep, disposables when we're out. We're considering going with cloth while we're out and about now that it's warmer outside, but we aren't there yet. We also have an apartment and don't have a washer/dryer in here, I hand wash the diapers during the week, but it's harder to get them to dry withohut the heaters on. :/

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I EC'd two babies (one from 2 months, the other from birth), both were great at 3-4 months old but were pretty much entirely in diapers from 8-14 months because we were all out-of-sync and frustrated. There seems to be a potty training sensitive period around 15-18 months old (remember, US babies used to be trained at 1.5 yrs, not 3 months). so with my second, when he got to that age of us being out-of-sync, I just relaxed (still made efforts to EC at obvious times, like after waking up dry) and told myself that I would set aside 3-4 days to re-focus on pottying before he turned 18 months old. This strategy worked decently for us.